Another weird bit of history found under foot

I like to walk around new areas to get a feel for what's really going
on. There's something about moving around at car speeds that makes it
impossible to really notice everything which is there. A bicycle
improves things significantly, but sometimes you really do need to get
out on foot and go rather slowly. This is how I turned up my random
anode
and
buried rails
on past outings.

Last week, I encountered something even more unusual while crossing a
street.

Seeing a metal bump smack in the middle of a street which is otherwise
entirely asphalt got my attention. Just at a first glance, it almost
looks like someone left a shovel handle in place when the paving was
done. However, a closer look reveals more.

Use your imagination and now you can see that it's not a shovel handle.
Instead, it's the top third of four letters: S T O P. At some time in
the past, this little town (Boerne, TX) must have used metal bumps in
the road as "stop signs". I didn't even know such things ever existed.
Based on my attempts to find information online, perhaps they were never
widely used. Not knowing what to call this thing (a stop bump?)
probably isn't helping.

I made no attempts to look for others, since it was just a random
discovery and not an obsession. For all I know, the other side streets
may also have these things set into the ground where they meet the main
drag.

It doesn't seem like it would be particularly effective at being noticed
by drivers, even when it wasn't mostly covered by asphalt. I guess the
early days of anything are bound to have a bunch of dead-end inventions.
It's just not every day that you can just stumble across one.